Services

Cloud computing can quickly become a double-edged sword. Cloud services are so easy to scale that they can become unwieldy, with IT staff lacking the visibility and structure to manage their cloud environments effectively. Frequently, we find that organizations are overprovisioned, paying for more than they need. In some cases, they have idle resources, often for storage, which also represent unnecessary costs; in others, they may be unaware of security vulnerabilities, such as open ports.

When organizations reach this point, they often engage a partner to optimize instances, identify unused resources and regain control from cost and security perspectives. We offer this kind of support through our Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Optimization assessments. Our goal is to enable customers to create more structure around the cloud so that they can strengthen monitoring and management of these resources.

We’ve all been there: a customer is looking for documentation that you just don’t have readily at hand. Then the idea strikes that you can simply reuse some documentation created for a previous project or repurpose vendor product documentation to your customer’s specific needs. But as someone who has sat on both sides of that table as a consultant and a customer, I can promise you that customers can tell when you’ve copied and pasted that PowerPoint.

This will make customers take your presentation and your recommendations as a professional less seriously. Nobody likes to feel like they’re being served reheated leftovers, and our customers are no different.

I had an IT Project Manager as a client who confided in me that he was quite familiar with our products’ documentation and would cast aside any documents provided to him that were similar in broad strokes to documents he had already seen. Many of our customers in ServiceNow Solutions do plenty of research on their own about ServiceNow as a platform before we ever talk to them. It’s our job as IT Consultants to ensure that the documents we provide bring value that’s specific to their unique needs, beyond what a visit to any internal wiki or a google search can offer.

But how can they tell? They know because of the inherent inconsistency in written voice that occurs when documentation is compiled from multiple primary and secondary sources. This blog post will describe what a written voice is and how to maximize the impact of both business and technical writing by using a consistent written voice

2020 is over. And while it was an unprecedented year, the As a Service companies like Five9 helped make the widespread adoption of remote work a reality. For more As a Service information, check out my other blog series.

It takes a catastrophic event to stress test a system. Last year was just that event, as we saw massive amounts of internet traffic, cloud services up and down and sometimes degraded. Through it all, Five9 continued to function and moved forward with mergers and acquisitions.

Within CDW’s AWS practice, we maintain a number of AWS accounts for managing our day-to-day business activities. One of the accounts is the “Sandbox Training” account that provides an environment for our CDW coworkers to learn and experiment with a multitude AWS services.

Periodically, we go to the account and try to understand the cost and resource usage pattern within the account. Recently I found out that there were many snapshots created by AWS Backups in our training account. Most likely, the vault was created as a part of the training and learning exercise. The AWS Backup policy was created to back up a few EBS volumes every night. Due to an oversight, the user forgot to delete the backup policy after the experimentation was over.

Cisco recently made it a requirement that any customer purchasing Webex Contact Center must also have a partner to handle their tier 1 and tier 2 (non-platform related) issues. To meet this need, CDW is excited to offer a Webex Calling/Webex Contact Center-focused Managed Collaboration Anywhere service as part of our extensive services catalog.

We created three service packages that will work for any customer: basic, essential or premium. Also available are add-on options, such as our call experience testing or managing the network that the Webex services utilize.

Automating security operations, or SecOps, is one of the most powerful strategies organizations can employ to protect themselves and their data. All too often, however, they don’t leverage it as well as they could.

Security automation pulls together data from disparate systems to make information more visible and actionable. For example, a solution may not only alert IT teams to a critical vulnerability on enterprise devices but also initiate remediation. It could spot a vulnerability that can be solved with a specific patch, so staff members can determine the best way to solve the problem.

Here are a few of the ways organizations are putting SecOps to work, delivering greater efficiencies and peace of mind to their IT teams.